Being in Oslo
during the awarding of the historical 100th Nobel Peace
Prize to kofi Annan and the United Nations seemed to be a good time
to read a biography of the founder of the Prize, Alfred Noble. Of
course Noble had died before Gandhi become known outside South
Africa, where he started his public life as a nonviolent activist;
however, curiosity led me to the index of the hefty biography by
Swedish writer Kenne Fant to see if the Mahatma made into the tome.
There was one entry. On p. 265 we read, ‘like other Nobelists, such
as Bertha von Suttner, Mahatma Gandhi, martin Luther King, Jr., and
Bertrand Russell, Einstein was a champion of peace.’1
This is not surprising: when asked to list Noble laureates people
can usually come up with the name of the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa
and generally Gandhi. The only problem is that Gandhi, although
nominated several times, was never a recipient of the Prize.

Noble Peace Prize
chronicler Gray suggests a ‘curious omission’ when people like
Martin Luther King, Jr. (the 1964 laureate who acknowledged Gandhi
as his mentor) and 1960 Noble Prize winner Albert Luthuli (who
applied Gandhi’s principal in South Africa) are duly honored, but
Gandhi, ‘the first to employ nonviolence in political context, was
never awarded the peace Prize’.2 Gray adds that ‘A great
many people have wondered, over the year, why Gandhi was never
chosen for a Nobel Peace Prize.’3

Lip sky, in his
account of the history of the Peace Prize, noted that even the
relatively narrow range of choice circumscribed by the noble
committee was no guarantee that it would not be subjected to the
criticism that ‘is the lot of anyone who seeks to make a selection
from among a highly qualified field’.4 The furor, he
claims, result from the failure to award the prize to either Tolstoy
or Gandhi. In the case of Gandhi he points to a 1934 editorial in
the Christian Century as expressing widespread opinion that ‘if
Gandhi is not the most logical candidate for the Noble Prize, then
the popular idea of the function and purpose of that prize needs to
be revised.’5

In an analytical
review of the prize, Abrams also marks the point that there is a
conspicuous and unjustifiable absence of war-resister and non-resistant’s
among the concludes that ‘even less defendable is the parochial
neglect for so long of the non- western and non- Christian words’.6
He admits that while ‘there have not been many serious candidates…it
does the Committee little credit to have found a place for a General
Dawes7 in its rolls, and none for Mahatma Gandhi’.8

In 1999 Øyvind
TØnnesson, a project consultant with the Norwegian Noble Institute,
Admitted that Gandhi ‘has become the strongest symbol of
non-violence in the 20th century. It is widely held-in
retrospect-that the Indian national leader should have been the very
man to be selected for the Noble Peace Prize.’9 Even
August Schou, 10 one-time director of the Noble
Institute, and the current director, Geir lundestad, 11
have expressed similar views.

During this 100th
anniversary of the Noble Prize, it is perhaps time, therefore, to
revisit some perennial questions: Who should get the world’s top
peace Prize? Who does get it? And, more generally, who should be
award peace prize per se?

The Awarding of
Noble Prizes

The last will and
testament of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, dated 27 November 1895,
stipulated that the bulk of his considerable fortune was to
constitute a fund known as the Noble foundation. With Noble’s date,
on 10 December 1896, and the making public of the will, the legal
deficiencies and flaws of the document came to light. Its
proclamation was greeted with criticism and protest, family members
were shocked and the intended prize-givers expressed misgivings and
doubt its provisions. However, due to the tireless efforts of the
executors of the will, and in particular those of the young Ragnar
Sohlman, Nobel’s last secretary, the obstacles were overcome and the
machinery for the awards was finally set up. As Schou commented, the
setting up of the Foundation was generally ‘received with
acclamation throughout the civilized words’.12

The prize was to go
to those individual who had best served humanity in the previous
year. A note included with the will expressed Nobel’s desire ‘that
in awarding the prize no consideration whatever shall be given to
the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall
receive the price, weather he be a Scandinavian or not’.

Three prizes were
to be awarded to researchers in physics, chemistry and medicine, a
fourth was for ‘ideal [did he mean idealist? 13] literary
accomplishment ‘and, finally, the fifth prize was to go the person
‘who had worked the most or the best for the fraternity among people
and the abolition or reduction of permanent armies, as well as the
establishment and promotion of peace congresses’. 14

Nobel’s intention
to institute a peace prize had already been expressed in his earlier
will of 1898 and in a letter to Baroness Bertha von Suttner.15
Further, his commitment to peace was made clear when he left
one per cent of his assets to the Austrian Peace League.16
The proposed Peace prize, however, was plagued with controversy from
the movement Noble’s intensions become known.

When the statutes
of the Norwegian Noble Committee were finally constituted they
contained a number of compromises. Instead of being restricted to
individuals as Noble indented, ‘institutions were added in order to
appease some of the Swedish opponents of the prize’, and, again, on
the basis that his wishes were impractical, it was determined that
the prize would not be restricted to works undertaken in the
previous year. 17 Further, according to Abrams, there is
evidence that ‘ Noble wished his money to be used not so much to
reward past performance as to free individuals from financial cares
so that they could be of greater service in the future’. 18
This however was not made explicit in the will and
consequently the Prize often went ‘ to persons whose contributions
was far behind them ‘19 and those who had no need of
being freed from financial cares in order to be able to continue in
service. And those be end up with the list of laureates that we
have, although this may not be the list Alfred Noble may have wished
for.20

The questions of
why Gandhi is not on this list is, however, still relevant. An
attempt to determine the reasons for Gandhi’s omission from the rank
of laureates is plagued by procedural difficulties. The Noble
statutes forbid public revelation of the deliberations of the
Committee or the disclosure of the list of nominees for any given
year. Although some indication of the reasons for decisions are now
given, the Norwegian Committee had, before the 1960s, chosen to
interpret the rules reasonably strictly .21 Norwegian
Freedom of information legislation is Limited to Government
agencies, and, consequently, cannot be used for the public security
of the Committee’s deliberations.

Gandhi’s
Nominations for the Noble Peace Prize

In 1934, in an
editorial, the journal Christian Century suggested the nomination of
Gandhi for the Nobel Prize. The note continued,

Why not award the
noble Peace Prize to Gandhi? It would be no personal favour to him
and he probably does not want it. The honor would not greatly
impress him and he would not know what to do with so much money
except given it away. These are all high qualifications for such a
prize. The Noble committee could find no worthy recipient for the
award in 1933. This is the seventh time in thirty–five years that
the prize has been reserved. Of the twenty-five awards that have
been made to eminent promoters of peace, too many have gone, as the
Stockholm peace society protests, to ‘presidents, ministers and
other high officials’ and too few to ‘working friends of peace or to
really radical proponents of peace and disarmament’. It is asserted
that the founder’s intention was to encourage bold dreamers and
prophetic sprits whose ideas are too far ahead of their time to win
attention without some such adventitious aid, rather than to reward
practical politicians who merely negotiated another treaty or took
another mile of trench in the long campaign against bloodshed.22

Gandhi and his
ideas of nonviolence were well known by this time. As the leader of
the famous Salt March to the seaside village of Dandi to challenges
the might of the British Empire by breaking the iniquitous laws
imposing a tax on salt, he had been Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year
for 1930; and in 1934 his nonviolent philosophy was widely
publicized in America through Richard B Gregg’s landmark book The
Power of Non-Violence. The Christian Century suggestion of a Peace
Prize nomination by anyone with the requisite standing was
forthcoming.23 After assessing Gandhi’s through on
international affairs, political scientist Paul F Power has
maintained that ‘Gandhi deserved a place among the great spokesmen
for peace’ adding that the 1934 Christian Century proposal ‘deserved
considerably more serious attention than it received from world
opinion’ 24

The story, however,
did non end there. Gandhi was officially nominated several times
before the end of his life. The first nomination was by Norwegian
parliamentarian Ole colbjØrnsen
in 1937, and the nomination was repeated during the following two
years and again a few times towards the end of Gandhi’s life.25

There has been
speculation that Gandhi missed out because of over British pressure
on the Noble Committee not to award the prize to there main
anti-imperialist enemy, or because the Norwegians did not want to
antagonize the British the way they had antagonized Hitler by
awarding the 1936 prize to the passionate German journalist,
pacifist and opponent of German rearmament, Cart von Ossietzky.
There is little creditable evidence to back up these charges.26

The 1960 Peace
Prize, awarded in 1961, was a ground-breaking one. The peace
laureate Albert John Luthuli, formerly President of the African
national Congress, had long engaged in a peaceful struggle against
apartheid. Abrams make the important point that ‘it was noteworthy
that the Committee had finally found a laureate outside the limits
of western civilization’.27 Perhaps it was this
Eurocentrism, the pre-war Norwegian international bias or, the
interpretation preferred by the Norwegian Noble Committee, Gandhi’s
untimely death, more than any British political pressure, that
defeated the honoring of the Mahatma. As Jacob Sverdrup, then
director of the Norwegian Noble Institute, commented to me in 1987,

I
don’t know why Gandhi didn’t get the Prize- and nobody else does.
All members of the noble Committee from those years are now dead,
and no records are kept on their deliberation. I suppose he would
have got the prize if he hadn’t been killed been killed in the
beginning of 1948, but that is just my guess.28

While some think
that Gandhi received the Prize, and a great many believe that he
should have received it, it seems fair to say that the laureates are
not generally peace activists. This of course does not mean that the
prize is not at times awarded in an uncharacteristic of course does
not mean that Prize is not time awarded in an uncharacteristic
manner, nor does it mean that there are not other prestigious prizes
that generally do go to peace activists.

Other Prizes, the
Same Approach

George Bernard Shaw
reportedly remarked that the Noble Peace Prize is like a life
preserver thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore.29
Remember that this was not Noble’s intention. The money from the
Prize was to make it easier from ‘dreamers’ so that they could more
effectively continue their work.

The formalities of
turning his dreams into reality meant that many compromises were
entreated into and the Prizes tended to go to elderly work long
before they received the prize, or to well-respected organizations.
What were to be developments grants for talented individuals whose
‘high promise is so often lost because they are impartial and
without means’30 too often ended up as mere decorations.

Future, the Prizes
have tended to be ‘safe’ awards. Had the Mahatma lived long enough,
it seems almost certain that he would have been the laureate in
1948, but probably it was for the reasons of playing it safe that
Gandhi missed out on receiving the 1947 Prize. In late 1946 and
early 1947, Gandhi was on his lonely pilgrimage bringing the peace
to war-ravaged rural Bengal. Following that, he toured riot-affected
areas in Bihar, and almost single-handedly, through his heroic
fasts, brought peace to riot-torn Calcutta and Delhi. Few have done
more in such a short time to establish fraternity between warning
people.

Although Gandhi had
shepherded his country to independence front the British Empire
through mostly nonviolence struggle in August, communal slaughter
was going on and newly independent India and Pakistan were at war
over Kashmir at the time of the deliberations of the Noble
Committee. Further, Gandhi seemed to be condoning India’s action of
sending its troops to fight the Kashmir invaders and perhaps a
caution Committee may have worried about the direction Gandhi might
take on the as yet unresolved Kashmir issue. Gandhi’s speeches may
have been overly political and possibly the committee did not ant to
take a risk in giving the prize to someone who might end up being
overly belligerent immediately thereafter.31

But, at times, the
Committee has proved adventurous. The prize to Luthuli and King were
‘political’ and rewarded those in situation where the solution to
the problems they were confronting were not necessarily obvious. And
future, these awards shows that the Noble Peace Prize Could be a way
of expressing ‘admiration for individual who represented values
which it regarded as essential elements in the establish of a word
society founded on peace and justice.’32 And recently the
noble committee seem to have taken a somewhat more proactive
position than the usual more reactive one.

There are now
hundreds of peace and human right prizes given out around the world.
Some have tried to outdo the Noble Prize. For example in 1995 India
instituted the Gandhi Peace Prize with an award large than that
given for the Noble Prize. The recipients have been peace workers,
and a multicultural lot-but still elderly and well – known men
rather than young nonviolence activists. The first receipt was
Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian presided who espoused peaceful change
and social and racial equality. Other recipients have included the
Sri Lankan foundation of the Sarvodaya Shramdana Movement A. T.
Ariyaratna, the charitable Ramakrishna Mission, the Indian social
activist Baba Amte, and, in 2000, Nelson Mandela.

Prizes such as
these did not satisfy everyone. There have also always been prizes
for grassroots peace activists. For example in India in 1977, in
memory of Gandhi’s close
disciple the constructive workers Jamnalal Bajaj, a foundation was
set up to foster projects for rural development. The foundation also
presented awards for individuals in India who made outstanding
contributions in the fields of constructive work (including Baba
Amte 19yeas before he received the Gandhi Peace Prizes), the
application of science and technology for rural development, and the
uplift and welfare of women and children. Ten years later it
institution an award for promoting Gandhian values outside India
(the list of recipients includes Pierre Parodi of the Community of
the Ark; Danilo Dolci, the ‘Gandhi of Sicily’; and the founder of
modern peace research, Johan Galtung).

The Jamnalal Bajaj
Award is not as well known outside Gandhian circles as the Gandhi
Peace Prize; however, if one can second guess the Mahatma, if he
would champion a prize at all, it would probably be the Jamnalal
Bajaj Award rather than the Gandhi peace Prize.

There is a similar
dichotomy in the Scandinavian prize. Most people know about the
Noble Prize, but most do not know about the Right livelihood Award (RLA)
even through the RLA, now commonly known as the Alternative Noble
Prize, may go to those who are doing more for peace in the broadest
than the recipient of the Noble Prize.

The right
Livelihood Award and the noble Peace Prize

In 1979 the
Swedish-German philatelist Jakob von Uexkull, who through that the
Noble Prize ignored too much work and knowledge that was vital for
the future of the planet, asked Noble Foundation to consider the
creation of a new award aimed at meeting the needs of the Third
World and the planet. There is after all a precedent for instituting
prize not mentioned in Noble’s will-the prize for economics (or
‘Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Noble’) was set up in 1968 by
the Bank of Sweden. However, perhaps not surprisingly, von Uexkull’s
proposal was not accepted so he sold his stamp collection and
endowed the award himself. Since 1980, the RLA has gone annually to
several recipient fortunes in their projects or people who may not
need money but who could benefit from the publicity. In the world of
Tom Woodhouse, the editor of the books detailing the RLA recipients,
the Awards ‘aims to stimulate a denoted about the values underlying
our society and goals. Before we ask “How to?” we must ask “What
for?”… The Award aims to seek out those whose knowledge leads ti
self-realization, and the realization of values.’34 The
Award recognized those who work for peace and disarmament, human
fights and social justice, sustainable economic development,
environment regeneration, and human development (through improvement
in health, housing, education, and cultural and spiritual renewal;
or appropriate technologies).35. Over a third of the
recipients have been women and almost half have come from the Third
world. The RLA ceremony is held on the day before the Noble Prize
presentation in the Swedish parliament.

While many on the
Noble Peace Prize still go to respected institution and elderly male
diplomats, in recent decades there has been something of a shift in
the awarding of the Noble Prize. While caution has not entirely been
through to the wind, there a discernible tendency that they are
becoming more political in the narrow defined sense of the word,
more proactive, and making up for previous omission.

Occasionally Noble
Peace Prize have gone to youthful activists, and this is perhaps
especially evidence in the 1977 award to Betty Williams and Mairead
Corrigan, the co- founder of the Peace People of Northern Ireland.
Not only were they in their early thirties, but they were women.
Since then the relatively youthful Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the
indigenous human rights campaigner from Guatemala was honoured in
1992; and in 1997 Jody Williams of the International Campaign to Ban
Landmines was also honoured.

In the last few
decades there also seems to have been less concern for the possible
political consequences of presenting awards. In 1975 the Soviet
government was angered by the honoring of human rights campaigner
Andrei Sakharov, China was angered by the honoring of Bishop Belo
and Jose Ramos-Horta for their work aimed at a peaceful resolution
of the East Timorese conflict.

There awards can be
seen as being overly political, and this does not seem to have
greatly worried the Committee. They have also been
proactive-conflicts had not ended, and the Prize, probably by
design, put pressure on the party the recipients were challenging,
and reminded them that the world was watching. In a similar vein,
the 1991 Prize went to arrested Burmese opposition leader Aung san
Suu Kui, and the 1993 Prize went to Nelson Mandela and Frederik de
Klerk of South Africa after the new constitution enfranchising non-
whites had been written but before the all-race election that were
to produce a black majority government and legalized apartheid.
Further, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel, and the
1998 Prize to John Hume and David Trimble of Northern Ireland seemed
to be calculated to help processes that were in train, rather than
await a successful outcome and then honour the architects.

Whether this is
merely a new sprit of adventurousness born from a critical
examination of the list of past laureates, or whether it has
something to do with the pressure from the growing prestige of other
prize such as the RLA is difficult to determine. However, if we
second guess Noble, the way I did Gandhi above, would it be fair to
say that even with these developments he would be more in favour of
the RLA than the world’s most prestigious prize that is handed out
in his name?

It now seems fairly
certain that Gandhi was going to get the Noble Peace Prize in 1948
but he was killed just a little too soon. But by then he would have
been another elderly statesman, albeit not a Westerner this time,
who did nit need the life preserver. I would like to think that, if
Uexkull had done his visionary work by the time, Gandhi would have
received the RLA. However, rather than the almost octogenarian
Gandhi, perhaps the most famous person in the world, the recipient
would have been Gandhi the young political activist in his thirties
fighting foot the rights of indentured Indian labourers in South
Africa-the kind of person Alfred Noble had in mind when he conceived
of his prize.

Sources:

Kenne Fant, Alfred Noble: A
Biography (New York: Arcade, 1993).

Tony Gray, Champions of Peace: The
Story of Alfred Noble, the Peace Prize and the laureates ( New
York: Paddington Press, 1976), p.11.

Lipsky, Quest for Peace, p.260.
The Christian Century editorial appeared on 14 March 1934; see
below.

Irwin Abrams, ‘The Noble prize-A
balance Sheet’, American Journal Of Economics and Sociology, 21,
3 (1962), pp. 225-243 at p. 241. Falnes, in a major study of the
Peace prize, notes that first 30 years of the award, out of 332
proposed candidates, 37 were Americans, 35 British, 30 French,
24 Germans and 24 Italians, 16 Swedes, six Danes, five Dutch,
five Poles, Four Australian and four Czechs. Oscar Julius falnes,
Norway the Noble Peace Prize, (New York: AMS, 1967), p. 232

With Austen Chamberlain, the joint
winner in 1925. US Vice- president and Chairman of the Allied
Reparation Commission, Dawes was the originator of the ‘Dawes
Plan’, a report on German economic problems arising out of
Germany’s post-war treaty obligations.

A reproduction of Nobel’s last
will and testament can be found in fant, Alfred Noble, p.329.

That letter shied away from
specifics. He wrote simply that prize ‘would be awarded to him
or her who has made the greatest step in bringing Europe
nearer to the ideas of general peace’, quoted in T.W. MacCallum
and S. Taylor, The Noble Prize – Winners and the Noble
foundation 1901 – 1937 (Zurich: Central European Times, 1938),
p.330

See Irwin Abrams ‘The
Transformation of the Noble Peace Prize’, Peace and Change, 10,
3-4 (1984), pp 1-25; and Irwin Abrams, ‘The Many Meaning of the
Noble Peace Prize’, in Holl and kjelling (eds), The Nobel
Peace Prize and the laureates, pp. 13-33.

Lipsky, Quest for Peace, p. xx;
and Abrams, ‘The Noble Prize’, p.228. reward practical
politicians who merely negotiated another treaty or took another
mile of trench in the long campaign against bloodshed.22

The Christian Century (14 March
1934).

The 1934 Prize went to former
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson. Faithful to the
intent of Nobel’s will to reward those who had worked to reduce
standing armies and promote peace congresses, few could have
been more appropriate as candidates than Henderson: he was
President of the World Disarmament Conference at Geneva from
1923 to 1924.